Solutions for user notifications on front-end

[burning]

Hi all,

Im currently building a photo sharing website and have a first version finished. Next step is to incorporate notifications in the website if a user likes one of your photo's, or comments on a photo you posted.

Just like the notification bell at the top of the forums. Any idea how to approach this functionality?

Thanks in advance.

[abdus]

• Send AJAX requests to poll the server for updates. Easy to implement but puts strain on the server. 
• Use long polling (reply to a request only when there's an update on the server). A bit more difficult, but fewer unnecessary requests. 
• Use websockets (Socket.io, Pushy for push notifications) or SSR (server sent events). Ideal, but a bit more involved to implement.

[dragan]

That's probably done with push notifications and the Push API (not sure about service workers).

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/codelabs/push-notifications/

Apparently it's not widely supported yet, so I guess you'll have to look out for fallbacks.

[DaveP]

intercooler.js (which I may have mentioned before ) has beta support for Server Sent Events. I haven't tried SSE, but I'm a big fan of intercooler generally.

[burning]

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

Another question; how do i store these 'notifications' in my processwire installation, and how do i check whether they are 'read or seen' by the user, and thus delete them?

[abdus]

You'd have to represent each reaction (e.g. seen, read) using a Page with a user (Page Reference) and a timestamp field (using `created` may suffice) and relate it to an action (e.g. X posted a new picture).

Using simple image fields for storing images probably wouldn't be enough. Because images now have to hold a lot more data than they were designed for (when was this image posted, who reacted to it, what was the reaction). You'd need a more complex data structure (using Pages and fields, or custom fieldtypes) to represent all actions, reactions and events.

In short: it's not trivial. Or I'm making this complicated in my head.

[DaveP]

3 minutes ago, abdus said:

In short: it's not trivial. Or I'm making this complicated in my head.

Absolutely right, it's not trivial and it can very quickly become properly complicated.  @abdus has very quickly pretty much nailed my current thinking on this kind of functionality.

I'm currently working on just such a system (with the added extra of location-aware messages), but by breaking it down into manageable bits (I'm hoping) it becomes feasible. 

[burning]

Thanks.

I already have a sort of page structure with images and users. So when a user likes a image, the image id is stored in a field in the user template so i can keep track on which user likes which image. The image itself is a page containing data of the image (title, description, exif data of the image, user_id who added the image, etc).

Of course I can add the user_ids to a field to the image page itself, but that doesn't keep track if the user of which the image belongs to has 'seen' the notification.

 

[DaveP]

I *think* you could replace the field in the user template (a user is a page, right?) with a repeater or a PageTable (best bet) and use this to store references to 'reactions'. These being pages, could then contain fields for image/page id, kind of reaction (like/share whatever), and that the image poster has been notified of that reaction.

[burning]

Ah that indeed would be a good start i guess. Thanks for your replies. I will make a start of the functionality tonight and keep u updated with the progress  

[Schwab]

On 19.10.2017 at 1:21 PM, burning said:

Ah that indeed would be a good start i guess. Thanks for your replies. I will make a start of the functionality tonight and keep u updated with the progress  

How did you do it in the end?

I'm thinking about how to implement such a feature as well. But instead of additional fields I'm thinking to save some variables in the user session and compare them with the actual data.

I have to do some more research to see if that really is an option.

[burning]

On 4/27/2018 at 7:46 PM, Schwab said:

How did you do it in the end?

I'm thinking about how to implement such a feature as well. But instead of additional fields I'm thinking to save some variables in the user session and compare them with the actual data.

I have to do some more research to see if that really is an option.

I ended up having a repeater in each userPage, when someone likes a photo, a Ajax request is sent and adding an item to the repeater, storing userId and the action (eg. like, follow comment oid). Then i built a simple notification window, which reads the repeater in the user-specific page and displays the correct message.

[Schwab]

On 6/16/2018 at 2:12 PM, burning said:

I ended up having a repeater in each userPage, when someone likes a photo, a Ajax request is sent and adding an item to the repeater, storing userId and the action (eg. like, follow comment oid). Then i built a simple notification window, which reads the repeater in the user-specific page and displays the correct message.

Yes I see. It depends on what notifications you want to have and who you want to notify.

I ultimately made it with an additional field on the page the user created. That field stores a MD5 Hash of the page content. When there is a change in the content, the hash changes. On the users dashboard I compare the page hash with the saved hash, if they differ, the user gets notified. When the user loads the page, his hash gets updated.